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Experts say the 2 percent drop in the number of contracting complaints to GAO disproves the theory that as federal spending drops, contractors will file more protests. Ralph White, the managing associate general counsel for procurement law at GAO, said agencies and vendors have a better understanding than ever about their likelihood of success.

Tucked away inside the bipartisan budget deal announced with much fanfare this week is a proposal limiting the maximum level contractors can charge the government to pay the salaries of their top executives to nearly half of what it is currently. But it may not be the final word on the issue on the sticky issue of contractor compensation. the budget deal's proposed changes to taxpayer-funded contractor salaries are competing with another piece of bipartisan legislation currently before Congress. The annual Defense Authorization Act seeks to lower the compensation limit but by far less than the budget deal.

Four senior TechAmerica officials, Trey Hodgkins, senior vice president global public sector; Erica McCann, manager of procurement policy; Carol Henton, vice president of state and local government division; and Pam Walker, senior director for homeland security; took similar roles with ITI's new IT Alliance for Public Sector organization, which will focus on technology and acquisition issues.

On this week's Capital Impact show, Bloomberg Government analysts will discuss what the acquisition market is like for the federal government's top technology services vendors, and the debate in Congress over the military's camouflage uniforms policy.
August 22, 2013

The Obama administration has called on Congress to cap government-reimbursed contractor compensation at $400,000, a move that the head of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy said would save hundreds of millions of dollars. Joe Jordan, the OFPP administrator, said the White House would send proposed legislation to Congress next week.

Veterans service organizations say despite attempts at improvement, the Department of Veterans Affairs' verification process for veteran-owned small businesses is still barring legitimate firms from contracts with the department, while doing little to deter actual fraud.

Agencies must meet annual goals between 2013
and 2015 to enter data into the Past
Performance Information Retrieval System. Joe
Jordan, the administrator of the Office of
Federal Procurement Policy, said inputting
and referring to vendor performance information
can reduce risks for agencies.

Despite a big policy push from the administration, some agencies have lagged in implementing guidance dealing with interagency contracting, according to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office. Still, GAO said the creation of a policy framework by the Office of Federal Procurement Policy had gone a long way toward ameliorating some of the issues that landed interagency contracting on the watchdog agency's high-risk list eight years ago, such as duplication and unclear lines of authority between agencies.